Design Lead

Top Hat • Full-time • Remote (Canada) • 3w ago

Fast Facts

Top Hat is seeking a Product Design Lead with at least 5 years of experience to oversee the entire design process from research to implementation, collaborating with teams to improve user experience and design systems.

Responsibilities: Engage directly with professors and students to understand challenges, collaborate with product managers, iterate on design concepts, ship features frequently, and contribute to team and design process improvements.

Skills: Proven experience in product design (or related roles), strong visual design intuition, knowledge of accessible design practices, and experience in maintaining design systems.

Qualifications: Experience with AI tools in design is a plus, along with comfort in interaction design and usability testing methodologies.

Location: Canada, with a flexible, remote-first work environment.

Compensation: Not provided by employer. Typical compensation ranges for this position are between $90,000 - $125,000.

We are looking for a Product Design Lead to join our team at Top Hat.

You’ll get to work across the entire design process: problem identification, user research, concept design, and implementation. Along the way, you’ll also have the opportunity to build your craft by working with other Product Designers & Senior Product Managers on our growing team.

The challenges you’ll get to explore are nuanced & complex: more than 3 million students are enrolled in courses using Top Hat at 750 of the top 1,000 higher ed institutions in North America.

You will:

Spend lots of time with professors and students: hearing from them directly about their challenges and aspirations.
Collaborate with product managers often: articulating which problems are worth solving and finding solutions.
Iterate on concepts: exploring lots of ideas in a low & high fidelity while getting feedback from designers, your team, and users.
Ship features often: Top Hat believes in true agile; shipping small and frequent updates to our products. You’ll be collaborating directly with engineers to ensure your designs are built to a high standard of quality.
Add to our team process: As a senior contributor, you’ll have opinions on how design systems and components should support the userbase. You’ll collaborate with the rest of our design organization to improve our processes and design systems—including recent advancements with AI.

About you:

Minimum of 5 years of experience working as a product designer (or similar role: UX Designer, Visual Designer, etc.)
You’ve experienced the full design process: from shipping to stakeholder management; you’ve understood people, defined problems, iterated on concepts, and shipped solutions.
You have a good intuition for visual design: you know how to use typography/colour/spacing to lay out an interface and understand how these decisions relate to a great user experience. You know it might be intangible, but taste matters.
You’re excited about designing accessible products: you have exposure to the ideas of inclusive design and are excited to build interfaces that work for everyone. Familiarity with WCAG 2.1 AA is a plus.
You take initiative beyond your role: you’re excited to grow your craft beyond your day-to-day work and have examples where you’ve made this happen.
Experience maintaining design systems: you’ve helped systematize design in your current role and are excited to grow your capabilities in this space.

Although not required for this role, we also love to see:

Curiosity for what AI means to design: you’ve gotten your hands dirty with AI; image generation, prototyping, and/or copy production. You see AI as a tool that will evolve the design process in tech (not replace it)
Comfort with interaction design: you’re able to look beyond just screens and think through the details of more complex (and often non-linear) interactions and animations.
Excited about usability: you’re interested in applying common useability heuristics to your designs or conducting useability benchmarks.

Why team members love working at Top Hat: